It is ironic that the Trump administration – which lectures the EU on freedom of expression and speaks unabashedly of “globalising” its cherished First Amendment – now proposes to use the exercise of free speech rights as a reason to exclude people from the US.
The Land of the Free may no longer be the home of the brave J1 student as it becomes increasingly a nation bound together by visible chains.
In May of this year, the processing of student visa applications was paused by US authorities. This was a signal of intent that restrictions were on the way. These restrictions, which landed last week, instruct applicants for F, M, and J visas to change their social media profile privacy settings to “public”. Refusal to do so may be seen as “an effort to evade or hide certain activity”.
Embassies that process applications have been instructed to screen a visa applicant’s online presence – which can involve more than social media activity – for “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States”. They are also asked to flag “advocacy for, aid or support for foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security” and “support for unlawful anti-Semitic harassment or violence”. Whether or not an applicant’s activity amounts to a threat is at the discretion of consular officers, the leaked cables said.
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These measures are part of a broader Trumpian assault on US universities and international students. His overall strategy can be passed off as the kind of attack on elitism that plays well with his voting base.
Why bend the knee in the cause of Maga when you have so many other options that impair your freedoms less dramatically, if at all?
By contrast to despots like Xi Jinping, who in more recent times has aimed to improve his country through scientific and technological innovation, Trump’s brand of autocracy has been characterised by Johns Hopkins Professor Bruce Parrott as not only threatening the democratic political order in the US but also its national understanding, economic wellbeing, public health and future as an international power.
Of course, much of this is performative and pitched at sating the appetites of a domestic audience that feasts on anti-immigrant sentiment and things that can, however loosely, be described as “woke”. Still, even the most ardent Trump supporter would agree that the internet is too large to police in anything like the comprehensive way the new visa restrictions suggest. It is, however, their chilling effect that should worry anyone who cares about freedom of expression.
There is something blatantly censorious in a screening process that treats the holding of certain ideas as dangerous or subversive. The constituency that this latest announcement is intended to please is one that insists on the absolute freedom to think the unthinkable, people who seek refuge in rabbit holes of pseudoscience. Freedom is at its most intoxicating when it involves freedom to defy logic, scientific facts or scientifically grounded assumptions. Show me your polluted lake, your dissolving ice cap or your trans teenager and I will hit you with my alternative facts. I see your reasonable hypothesis and raise you my latest conspiracy theory.
And it’s not all the work of so-called “deplorables”. Where would the White House be without the anxious but enabling centrists who search for method in the madness of King Trump, the left-leaning who are afraid to be too authentically left; those who have internalised the rhetorical bullying that perversely defines opposition to state extremism as extremist?
There is plenty of advice out there for students who still wish to travel to the US. But there is, literally, a world of opportunity out there way beyond the United States. Of course, other countries will also have visa restrictions of varying levels of severity, but why bend the knee in the cause of Maga when you have so many other options that impair your freedoms less dramatically, if at all?
[ US judge blocks Trump plan to close Harvard’s doors to international studentsOpens in new window ]
The profile of students attending higher education institutions in Ireland is, thankfully, more diverse nowadays, but the stereotype persists of the student radical glorying in a counter-hegemonic moment in college as they cruise towards the bourgeois dream of their parents – the dream of a professional existence. Where would conservative political parties be without their latter-day student radicals? What big law or accountancy firm partner doesn’t have faded photos from headier and hairier times on pickets and protests for causes as varied as student fees, hunger strikes, reproductive rights, apartheid elsewhere and wars everywhere?
We encourage our students to question things and to be open-minded and we don’t expect this to be inconsequential. Neither do we expect students to stay the same forever or to close their minds when they leave college or “the world of ideas” to live and work in the world. The idea that students will stop letting off steam or venting online for fear of future restrictions on their travel to the US is baleful. The idea that, before packing their bags they must cleanse their “online presence”, constitutes a depressing vision of self-censorship. It goes against all the tenets that underpin freedom and responsibility. Curated lives as manifested online are never as beautiful as the lives lived by their curators – but now we will incentivise an added layer of distortion under the shameless and expansive pretence that student activism is a threat to national security.
It is easy to imagine the eye-rolls of professional consular staff busily working in US embassies around the world at the thought of having to implement this latest Washington diktat. “A US visa is a privilege, not a right,” the announcement said – something that was never in dispute.
Thankfully, many of our students are not content to remain silent on issues that bear directly on their futures such as climate change, debt forgiveness and sustainability, nor on issues of gross injustice like the war and its attendant crimes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. We should valorise and emulate their courage with the reassurance that they have plenty of options other than the United States in which to pursue their dreams and live their best lives.
Donncha O’Connell is an Established Professor of Law in University of Galway. He has no immediate plans to travel to the US
